The Beatles - Revolver, review

The Beatles album Revolver is as good as it gets (Released August 5, 1966)
Rating: * * * * * [ESSENTIAL]

Their first psychedelic masterpiece, Revolver represents the Beatles at their most creative and cohesive, still a tight rocking unit firing on all cylinders but with a surging freedom of self-expression. It is arguably their greatest album, in which they introduce whole new vistas of sound yet still contain them within tightly structured and performed songs.

There is just so much going on: Indian tablas and sitars creating mystical magic for Harrison’s droning Love You Too, a sawing string quartet driving the heartbreaking vignette of loneliness in Eleanor Rigby, the ripe horns surging through the soulful Got to Get You Into My Life, recorded history’s first backwards guitar solo on the dreamy I’m Only Sleeping, dynamic twin lead on the blistering rocker And Your Bird Can Sing, the snappy R&B and political sniping of Taxman, the gorgeous harmonies of McCartney’s favourite ballad Here, There and Everywhere, tape loops, mountainous drumming and a spirit of anything-goes madness blowing out on the utterly extraordinary psychedelic epic Tomorrow Never Knows. Even Ringo, reliably the singer of the Beatles’ worst songs, is well catered for with the surrealist children’s playground classic Yellow Submarine.

Before the woolly politics of flower power had really taken over psychedelia, Revolver remains sharp and acerbic, its cutting quality emphasised by great electric guitar-playing from both George and John. The band looked fantastic, too, in hipster suits and dark glasses. Pound for pound and song for song, Revolver is as good as it gets, a real monster.